Gu Xuan said that the new concepts of space, time, and nature proposed by Neapolitan philosophers and how they constitute a moral and cosmological dialogue in an autonomous social world.
History, as a process of naturalization and objectification in the sphere of human action, is our basic premise. In order to delve into the composition of the autonomous social world, we will examine these works, as they were republished in 1713 and 1750 in large circulation over time.
In the first part of the book, we will begin by outlining the characteristics of Augustine's view of history and its relationship to Aristotle-Ptolemaic cosmology in order to understand how Bruni's philosophy came into being in constant discussions with these cultural paradigms.
Next, we will analyze the new notions of space and God proposed by Bruno, and how these ideas underpin the legitimacy and characteristics of his notions of history, such as the naturalized physical world, the desanctification of human society, and the autonomy of the environment.
We then apply this conception of history to Nolano's explanation of the crisis of religion in the sixteenth century, and the theoretical assumptions behind Bruno's conception of history.
We will delve into the nasal characteristics of historical knowledge and its relationship to philosophy, poetry, and painting. Although in the twenty-first century the decline of great historical narratives and the questioning of the boundaries between history and literature have led to questions about the status of historical science, our goal here is not to resolve the discussion, but to raise the possibility for the historian to play an active role as a critical intellectual of the society in which he lives.
In fact, what interests us most about Giordano Bruno's salvation is the importance he attaches to the human ability to think outside of established authority and to establish his destiny in the heat of experience.
We are interested in emphasizing the emergence of history as a kind of knowledge that attempts to describe and explain human behavior within the framework of changing variable realities, taking into account different perspectives on the same facts.
In the middle of the Renaissance, Augustine's view of history, in line with Aristotle-Ptolemy's interpretation of the universe, remained fully valid. We will begin by analyzing the main ideological premise, which, in addition to the historical situation, gives it an extraordinary capacity for survival and assimilation.
In the narrative of medieval history, human events are seen as gestadei guided by the divine plan, designs based on the authority of Scripture and cannot be fully known because of the infinite and indivisible nature of the Divine.
However, the only thing we know is the existence of the Last Judgment and God's desire for us to respond to His plan through commandments and prayers. This spiritual dependence is reinforced in the organicist concept of society, where human beings have no value as an individual.
Since birth, people have been classified as one of the three orders of feudal society: the clergy, the warriors, and the peasants, who had to maintain order and defend the territory. Thus, providence, as an eternal force, determines the purpose of humanity.
St. Augustine was one of the first church fathers to propose a religious view of history, arguing that time was created by God as a single linear flow that included past, present, and future.
While time is an eternal present to God, to humans we can only understand and grasp time through memory, attention, and expectations.
St. Augustine looks at time in a unique and universal way, portraying the events of the earth as a linear, irreversible historical epic that begins with Adam and ends at the Last Judgment.
The epic consists of eight epochs and aims to explain the educational process of the human race. The first six epochs are finite and are associated with the maturation of man after the birth of **, while the seventh and eighth epochs mark the transition from history to a period of transhistory.
Augustine's history is not only linear and progressive, but also fraught with conflicts, including the dualism of salvation and sin since the creation of mankind. This dualism is articulated in works such as the decivitatdei, in which humans have to choose between two cities or ways of conceiving the world.
Those who choose to live in Babylon will enjoy limited goods, their quest for a peaceful nation without transcendent significance, and will eventually crumble in the passage of time, like the Roman Empire.
The Roman Empire, while able to bring temporary peace to humanity, was built on its greed for new territories and power, so its desire for security made it more and more warlike, and its peace of mind fragile.
In contrast, the city of Jerusalem will be the place of choice for those who sincerely desire to worship God. Only these citizens, who have turned their souls completely to the supreme good, can be convinced that their actions have transcendent meaning and that they can be redeemed in the future.
The kingdom of God is in the church, and the will of God is embodied in the earthly world. The whole world is adding believers for the faith, whose hope is built on salvation and eternal peace.
When the decline of the Roman Empire was blamed on religion, Augustine began to correct this view, arguing that the essence of the reign and the earthly kingdom was completely different because their views of peace and justice were very different.
In Augustine's words, the earthly and the city of the gods are intertwined, culminating in the victory of the citizens. The Roman Empire, transcended in the mystical unity of the earthly, represented only a flamboyant expression of earthly sin, providing the faithful with signs of renewal to help them find salvation in the civitasdei.
The existence of the city of earth and the city of gods reveals people's dualistic interpretation of good and evil, as well as the rewards and punishments of good and evil. Because the date of the final judgment is undecided, we must distinguish between those who are chosen and those who are rejected.
Between the tenth and eleventh centuries, the influence of the Church was further expanded. Coupled with the exploitation of the peasants in feudal society, more people accepted Augustine's view of history.
The Church believes that in order to prove its worth, it is necessary to make actions in the mortal world, and these actions are only a transition to another world.
When the peasants began to realize the transcendent significance of the exploitation they endured, the Church cemented its undisputed moral and ideological authority. However, this change in perception did not happen overnight.
It was not until the twelfth century, when Arabic translations of some of Aristotle's works were introduced to Fransia via Spain, that the Church began to combine the imagination of the three orders, the Ptolemaic hypothesis, and Aristotle's cosmic hierarchy to form a general view of reality.
In Aristotle's speculative universe, the Earth occupies the center of the universe and is part of the sublunar sphere, characterized by the presence of objects that are constantly moving, changing, and decaying.
And Claudius Ptolemy, in his book Almagest of Astronomy, reached a more accurate calculation related to the movement of the sun by adding many epiciclos, the moon and the wandering stars.
In the universities of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Ptolemy's ideas were assimilated into Aristotle's model of the universe, with the main purpose of answering technical questions on topics such as calendars, positions**, distances, and the true stars of stars.
Aquinas, on the other hand, ultimately sanctified the immobility of the earth as the center of the fall and corruption of the universe. In this sense, the naturalization of humanity is attributed to the intense hierarchy of the universe, the basis of which is made up of the most formless and almost intangible matter in the Aristotelian sense.
From there, the scales of natural beings are established according to their perfection: from the least perfect (more form and less form) to the most perfect (more form and less matter).
In this way, it perfectly elevates the powers from plants, animals, people (natural beings with greater intellectual development), angels, astral powers, and finally the first stationary motor as the headmaster of the universe.
This engine is undoubtedly the God of the ** religion, and his existence is rationally proven. The hierarchy of the universe and nature is a testament to the divine hand behind the world order. The perfect scale of the universe will reinforce the superiority of some social classes over others, as in the mirror game.
The earliest Brunia's writings were cosmological in nature and were intended to "re-naturalize" celestial facts and to value the role of nature in the face of divine omnipotence. By 1572, important astronomical changes, within the framework of Aristotelian cosmology, were interpreted as the expounders of the book of Revelation.
Divine miracles, because there can be no change or alteration in the ethereal areas of the sky. Bruno's indignation at these statements – typical skepticism and beliefist attitudes, the view of God as an absolutely free being, and the discrediting of nature as a simple executor of legal tasks.
This constitutes the starting point for the elaboration of a new cosmology.